Charlie's Diary

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Sun, 31 Oct 2004

I, for one, welcome our new Cephalopod masters

With the death of finned fish stocks due to warming oceans and over-fishing comes the news that squid are taking over the oceans. In fact, the total biomass of giant squid now exceeds that of human beings -- not too surprising, given they've got 70% of the planet to roam over and we've only got the dry, arid bits.

Dr George Jackson from the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean studies in Tasmania said squid thrived during environmental disasters such as global warming.

The animal ate anything in that came their way, bred whenever possible and kept growing.

"This trend has been suggested to be due both to the removal of cephalopod predators such as toothed whales and tuna and an increase of cephalopods due to removal of finfish competitors,'' said Dr Jackson.

If it wasn't a symptom of an environmental disaster so serious that even The Queen of England is paying attention, the opportunities for fishy humour would be irresistible.

[Link] [Discuss warming]



posted at: 11:32 | path: /weird | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 30 Oct 2004

Bit rot

I haven't been posting enough lately.

Blogging started off for me as an unashamedly commercial promotional kind of thing (c'mon, tell me you haven't looked at what's at the top of my sidebar!) but rapidly turned into a diary habit. Cory Doctorow has commented that he uses blogging (his share of boingboing, I think) as a kind of collective memory for interesting memes, and so do I, some of the time: but that's an irregular use, and I think something of a minority one. More often than not it's just handy to have a venue in which I can blather anything that comes into my head, regardless of context. (It also comes in handy -- too handy, probably -- as a distraction from the writing that brings in the groceries.)

Anyway, I'm not the only person who isn't blogging as much of late. If you monitor a lot of weblogs you'll have noticed a tailing off of updates. Occasionally a moribund one will spark back to life (as has been the case with Billmon this week) but more often than not they go dark and finally 404 on you. About a third of my sidebar blogs are now in that uncertain limbo, and I've been wondering why ...

Partly, I think, it's the saturation news coverage from the US election process. The blogosphere took in a gigantic kick in the wake of 9/11, and has never really gotten over it: while weblogs can in principle talk about anything, 9/11 turned out to be a historically traumatic event, and I suppose when you live in interesting times paying attention to the events in question comes naturally. But now the whole thing has been coopted into a political process that has become increasingly polarized, so hostile and adversarial (to a degree far beyond the normal stylised posturing expected of any electoral beauty contest) that it is positively frightening.

After my initial strong opposition to the Iraq invasion, I've tried to keep off the topic -- and to keep quiet about American politics in general. After all, I'm not American, right? I don't get a vote. But this is now becoming problematic for me, because I think the outcome of this election will affect me profoundly and directly.

I write, for a living, in the English language. Like it or not, the largest English language market in the world is the United States. It should be no surprise to you, then, that about 70% of my income is paid in US dollars by American publishers. Leaving aside all issues of political or ideological affinity, or the fact that I've got numerous American friends and visit the USA a couple of times a year, the outcome of this election will influence me because the macroeconomic conditions set by the next administration, not to mention the ideological climate of fear, affect my wallet directly. Under the current administration the dollar, stable against a basket of other currencies for the past couple of decades, has slid by nearly 20%, giving me a hefty pay cut: I hope you can understand why this concerns me. So I think I do have some reason to speak out on the matter of the forthcoming election, even though I'm not a US citizen -- about as much claim as a non-naturalized resident or a non-registerable citizen.

I've been reluctant to speak out because of an inconvenient fact: anything you say on the internet will be recorded and may be held against you in future, by people or parties who don't even exist yet. Words in print are hostages to your future fortunes and as we're seeing, what you read and write can get you a visit by Homeland Security (for researching a novel, no less!) or the Secret Service (for talking about your prayers in public). Next time I step off an airliner and go through Immigration control I don't particularly want to be hauled off to one side and questioned closely about my writing, or my views, or my reason for visiting the United States -- especially in view of the fact that, as a nonresident alien, under US law I have fewer rights than Jose Padilla.

I've been watching the course of the Bush administration and the election campaign with increasing dread. If I was an enemy of the United States, I couldn't project a better outcome than for George W. Bush to be elected for a second term -- because I believe in the long term he will be, at best, a really bad President: at worst, a human disaster who will cast as long a shadow over the history of the 21st century on a global scale as Kaiser Wilhelm II cast over that of the 20th. And for much the same reasons.

Some uncontroversial facts are evident. Bush has brought in the largest government deficit in US history. He's presiding over the largest build-up of military spending in decades. Allegedly he's due to go back to Congress and ask for another $75Bn to continue the Iraq occupation ... big spender, huh? At the same time, he's taken an axe to his tax base and eliminated inheritance tax (a vital democratic defense against the establishment of a hereditary aristocracy) completely. Meanwhile, the US economy is not growing at the kind of speed it sustained during the early to late 1990's, and it has the ruinous burden of not one, but two foreign wars and occupations to support.

You don't need to discuss the wisdom or unwisdom of invading Afghanistan and Iraq to contemplate the fiscal issues. If Bush is re-elected and if he maintains his current course, he is going to need more money. And I suspect -- at this point we're talking about my personal analysis, we're off the uncontroversial territory -- he's going to thoroughly screw the US economy, to a degree that even Hoover couldn't quite contrive.

Meanwhile, there's a lot of anger out there. As noted here (and elsewhere on David Neiwert's excellent and thoughtful site) the emergence of eliminationist rhetoric into mainstream right wing dialogue since 9/11 has been very visible, and it is binging back some very unpleasant memories. The fuhrerprinzip and the dolchstoss are coming out to play and idiots (sorry!) like Karl Rove are encouraging this.

Economic collapse and unemployment breeds anger. A retreat from empire breeds anger. Racism breeds anger. There's a hideous brew out there, being pumped up by a media system that thrives on bad news because bad news -- the culture of fear -- boosts ratings. It seems that traditional adversarial democratic politics -- in which each side acknowledges that their opposition is a loyal opposition, whose ideas on how to manage the country may differ but whose loyalty isn't in question -- is itself in danger.

At this point I probably don't have to say that I would vastly prefer a clear Kerry victory next Tuesday. I really fear the alternative. Despite being critical of US foreign policy, I'm not actually an enemy of the United States: and I fear that if the political polarization continues to grow, the USA is destined to tear itself apart at the seams or decay into dictatorship and violence. (And that really will mean interesting times for us all to live through, I'll be looking for a new job ... assuming nobody comes for me in the night.)

[Discuss politics]



posted at: 20:56 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 29 Oct 2004

With advisors like these, who needs enemies?

According to the BBC, Israeli premier Ehud Barak had a narrow escape in the UK when the IAF Boeing 707 carrying his party (it was visiting Manchester for a refueling stop) "... was in collision with a baggage truck on the tarmac."

(False alarm: nobody injured, on the truck or the plane.)

The BBC goes on to add:

Mr Barak's senior policy adviser, Danny Yatom said: "It is good that it happened on the ground and not in the air."

The mind, she boggles.

[Link] [Discuss dumb]



posted at: 18:58 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 27 Oct 2004

A word from our sponsors

In between listening to BBC Radio 6 (who can't seem to get away from the giant hole Peelie's left in British music broadcasting) it's been a moderately good day for me. In between dinking with my new PDA (I chickened and went for a Palm Tungsten T5, when I figured out what all the software purchases would cost me on top of the machine if I switched to an Ipaq) I just signed contracts for a novella and something else I can't talk about yet ... when what did I learn? It turns out that Rogue Farm, the animated short film based on my story (of the same name) has been nominated for a BAFTA Scotland award in the Best Animation category.

Wow.

It's that time of year when the nights are drawing in -- it's now getting dark by about 5:30pm and not getting light until well after 8am. In winter my circadian rhythm takes a big hit; I start sleeping two extra hours a day and getting sleepy. I tend to retreat from the world, ignore the housekeeping, and eat too much: all symptoms of a mild seasonal depression. But I also tend to get creative urges and start work on writing projects at this time of year. Don't ask why: probably it's a sublimation of some ancient hibernation reflex. I'm slowly getting back to normal after all the travel. And if there's anything to get my enthusiasm up it's news like this.

Back to GLASSHOUSE, I think ...

[Link(right at the bottom)] [Discuss writing]



posted at: 16:15 | path: /writing | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 26 Oct 2004

Damn

John Peel has died.

Douglas Adams. Joe Strummer. John Peel. Large chunks of the formative culture of my youth are checking out way too early.



posted at: 14:15 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 24 Oct 2004

Whoops

I just spent the week in Leeds, visiting family. Originally I intended to go down there on Tuesday and back on Thursday, but it got shifted to Wednesday ... and then I ended up coming back Sunday instead. Sigh. I'm going to try and summon up the inclination to write something creative tomorrow; in the meantime, the only real news is that THE CLAN CORPORATE (third in the fantasy series from Tor) has officially been accepted, and is thus going into the queue for copy editing. And its predecessor, THE HIDDEN FAMILY, is due to end up on my desk with red ink all over it some time in the next few days. Just as I was getting back up to speed on re-writing GLASSHOUSE ...

[Discuss writing]



posted at: 22:42 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 19 Oct 2004

Scribble scribble

Back at work on GLASSHOUSE, birthday etceteras being safely out of the way without a hangover. Tomorrow I'm off for a couple of days to visit relatives, laptop in hand: not sure yet if I'm driving (the car needs a good long run, having done maybe fifty miles in the past six weeks) or getting the train (much more restful, easier to get work done).

When I get back, I am going to buy myself one of these.

[Discuss writing]



posted at: 23:35 | path: /writing | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 18 Oct 2004

Happy birthday to me

I turn 40 today.

Some people who turn 40 have a mid-life crisis. Me, I'm working on a mid-life smugness. (It's a lot more fun ...)

And right now, I'm feeling particularly smug about this:

UK Iron Sunrise cover

That's the cover of the Orbit (UK) edition of Iron Sunrise, which is due out next February.

Birthday presents don't come much better than that, do they?

[Discuss writing]



posted at: 15:57 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 15 Oct 2004

Attention Livejournal users

Some time ago somebody set up an unauthorized Livejournal feed from my weblog.

This is annoying to me because I don't administer it and can't update it. So when I moved my blog, four weeks ago, the LJ feed broke. Now I've moved the DNS for my server over, the LJ feed is barfing up a months' worth of my articles and people are complaining to me.

If you use LJ to track my blog, stop it. Instead, you can grab an RSS feed from here.

If you created the LJ feed, please delete it. Thank you.

We now return to our usual scheduled program ...



posted at: 23:01 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Been upgradin'

Been quiet because I'm upgrading to a new server.

The blog moved over some time ago, but while I've been travelling all over the place I haven't had time to take care of business. About ten domains needed their primary DNS shifting. Then there's a dozen or so user accounts to set up for email and web access, and half a dozen web sites to shift, other CGI-mediated software to deal with, and a whole load of mailing lists. This is with another guy (hi, Jon) helping out as sysadmin. It's a royal pain in the neck and hopefully it'll be several years before I have to move again. In fact, if it wasn't for the spam load (thousands per day to filter out of incoming mailboxes) and the mailing list server (mailman is a complete memory hog) I'd probably still be able to stick to the old box. But in this day and age, 64Mb just isn't enough.

It's my birthday on Monday, and I'm buying myself a new PDA. (One of these, if you're interested.) The new PDA will have twice the memory of my old server, and a CPU that runs at a clock speed 50% faster. It won't have the same storage capacity at first (0.5Gb against 10Gb) but I expect sticking 10Gb of flash memory in it should be eminently possible today if I'm feeling reckless with the cash, or cheaply in another year or two.

How times change. A budget server, circa 2000, is a PDA by 2004. Projected back to 1994, that budget server would have been equivalent to an exceedingly fast mid-range Sun box, and a decade earlier it would have had Seymour Cray drooling ...

I'm going to use my PDA to read ebooks, play Sim City 2000, check my email, and surf the web when I'm out of my house. Yesterday's supercomputer is truly today's toy.

[Discuss toys]



posted at: 20:41 | path: /excuses | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 13 Oct 2004

Tortoise or Hare

Some writers work constantly at slow speed, averaging 500-1000 words of polished prose a day -- at which rate the manuscript builds up, resulting in 180,000-350,000 words in a year. (A 300 page novel is roughly 100,000-110,000 words). Others work in bursts, taking time off between fits of compulsive creation in which they average 3000-10,000 words per day (at which rate, you can write the first draft of a respectable novel in a matter of weeks). However, it isn't necessarily easy for the readers to tell tortoises from hares on the basis of their output -- they publish books roughly as frequently, and the quality of ideas and prose may well be very similar. Even when the hares aren't writing they may still be busy working out the ideas they spew across the pages during their creative fits.

I've done both. I've been a tortoise, spending whole years writing a regular thousand words a day. But right now, this decade, I'm being a hare: there are periods when I write little then suddenly burp up the draft of an entire book in four to eight weeks. (Usually after thinking about it for months first.)

Earlier this year I wrote -- then re-wrote -- a fantasy novel. Then events conspired to derail my ability to focus on work. Now I'm getting back to normal, and after a break of about three months I'm able to contemplate working on a novel again. The novel I'm about to go to town on is GLASSHOUSE. I originally wrote it in about three weeks, in April '03. It's due to be handed in next summer, for publication in July '06. And the reason I'm going to go to work on it is that there's one bad side effect of being a hare: if you write in a tremendous rush, the urge to be finished can sometimes overwhelm the urge to create a satisfying ending.

The basic concept of GLASSHOUSE, the characters and setting and most of the action, are all fully-formed already. There are some infelicities in the prose, but that's to be expected of a book that is still in draft 1.1 -- that is, written then edited/polished once. It's 90% of the way there: in fact, I suspect I could publish it as-is ... but as in so many other jobs, the last 10% can easily take 90% of the time, or (if undone) generate 90% of the criticisms.

So what I'm about to do is: make a line-edit pass through the book, changing minor details and tweaking the prose and making notes on the side. Then I'm probably going to take an axe and chop off the final three chapters, about 20% of the novel. The current climax and ending is weak. I know why it's weak, and I've got a good idea of the shape a proper ending needs to be. When I've read the novel again I'll have a much more precise idea of the gaps I've got to plug, and I can sit down and take up writing the book again. Then I'll have to go back and edit the earlier chapters again, adding in any necessary hooks that the revised ending ties into ... and the manuscript, version 2.0 of GLASSHOUSE, will go back on the shelf for a couple of months to cool off before I make a final edit sweep through it and get ready to send it to the editor who has already bought it.

And this is why the hares aren't ultimately more productive than the tortoises ...

(Oh yes, in case you were wondering: GLASSHOUSE is a posthuman psychological thriller set in the future of ACCELERANDO, about seven centuries hence. The title is a pun on panopticon societies and military prisons. And for the rest, you'll have to wait until I've finished rewriting it.)

[Discuss writing]



posted at: 20:13 | path: /writing | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 11 Oct 2004

Drowning in memory

I notice that the price of flash memory cards is falling through the floor -- I've seen reports of 1Gb SD memory cards going for under US $100, and certainly they're down to £75 including VAT if you know where to look in the UK (not Dixons or PC World, both of whom seem to think that's a good price for 256Kb, thank you very much).

What to do with all that memory?

Well, I have a Palm Tungsten T3. And a neat-o utility called Plucker which is an offline web page and ebook viewer. And I don't have a really decent encyclopedia for my palm, yet. So ...

My first hint was this discussion of how to install Wikipedia on a PDA using TomeRaider as a database. Well, TomeRaider is (a) shareware and (b) development has been lagging on the PalmOS platform of late (that is, for the past couple of years). So I decided to see if I could follow the instructions for generating a static HTML version of wikipedia, like the ones at fixedreference.org, from the monthly raw SQL database dumps. I decided to use wiki2static, and then generate a Plucker database from it in the usual way.

Preliminary signs are good: my first static wikipedia build worked fine, albeit with table, graphic, and equation generation switched off -- just plain text for now. It's an intimidatingly huge glom of HTML, about 350,000 files totalling 2.8Gb, that took nearly 12 hours to generate on my 1.33GHz Powerbook G4. The Plucker build process is likely to run overnight and may die -- but there's more than one Plucker back end to try before giving up and so far it seems to be working.

All so that I'm never at a loss for an encyclopedia. Unless anyone can tell me how to get at the internal HTML tree in the Java-based Encyclopedia Britannica DVD distribtion ...?

[Discuss geekery]



posted at: 23:59 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 09 Oct 2004

Normal service resuming

If you've been following my blog for a while you might have wondered why -- apart from my travel schedule -- posting has been so light this autumn. You might even have wondered why I was spending so much time visiting family members.

I try not to post about my relatives (if they want blog entries they can start their own weblogs), but to cut a long story short two of my close family have been very ill. In one case it was a matter solved by routine surgery (to the extent that any surgery is routine, from the point of view of the patient!), but the other was a three-ring circus -- seven weeks in hospital, and the patient not expected to survive.

Well, the patient did survive, and is now out of hospital and clearly recovering. But you might speculate that weekly 500-mile round trips might have had something to do with distracting me from updating this journal ... and you wouldn't be wrong. It was, all in all, an extremely exhausting experience -- not just the travel, but being supportive to other family members who were closer to the action and under correspondingly more stress. Life-threatening exotic illnesses: just say no if anyone offers to sell you one, okay?

Anyway, this is by way of saying that I'm cautiously optimistic that life is getting back to normal. I'm left with a huge backlog of work to get my teeth into, but that's okay. Deadlines, unlike dead relatives, can be finessed.



posted at: 12:41 | path: /excuses | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 08 Oct 2004

Today's excuse

Blogging while recovering from what appears to be a classic case of traveller's diarrhoea (with additional florid symptoms that I'm not going to go into here -- use your imagination) is hard work ... I suppose it's inevitable that I'd finally have come down with something after the amount of travelling I've been doing lately, but Brussels wasn't exactly top of my list of places most likely to do it in.

Normal service will be resumed when, er, normal service is resuled. Suffice to say, I'm now plugged back into a broadband connection and catching my breath.



posted at: 17:06 | path: /excuses | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 02 Oct 2004

When data mining attacks

Funny what drops through the letter box when you're about to go away for a week, isn't it? Normally spam goes straight into the rubbish bin, but this one slipped through the net because it appeared to be a letter from a publisher and was therefore of some interest. So I opened it up, and this is what I found:

Dear Mr Stross,

My great hobby is researching ancestry.

Over the last few decades, during which I have carried out intensive research using countless genealogical archives, I have repeatedly stumbled across a whole host of sources containing information about the Stross family name. Having collected a great deal of data, I have now decided to publish the fascinating history of your name in book form. In dealing with the hundreds of christenings, marriages and deaths involved, I have restricted myself to the use of recognized sources. The outcome of all my efforts has resulted in a publication which should greatly interest you:

The Stross Family Chronicle

You, yourself -- as a descendant of this old name which goes back centuries -- are also included in this edition!

The chronicle details the historical development of the Stross name. The genealogical index alone covers some 25 pages (approx 1/3 of the book) and dates back several centuries to approx. 1625. I have also included surname variants. Besides dealing with the origin, significance and development of the surnamed in general, the book also deals with the history of heraldry (coats of arms) ...

I'm sure my Jewish ancestors would be fascinated to hear about all these christenings that went on. And I'd very much like to get my hands on whatever time machine "William Pince Publishers" used to edit history, ensuring that the Stross family name did indeed go back to 1625, seeing as how my Polish-Jewish immigrant ancestors changed their name to Stross just three generations ago, round about 1905. (Anglicizing their somewhat less pronouncable name to a mis-spelling of a German name.)

But there's more. For William Pince, Genealogist and Chairman of the S. G. N. Genealogical Foundation (not to mention owner of an offshore company -- registered in Holland -- that uses a secretarial service and fax number in London) goes on to explain:

In addition to this special offer, I have two more bonuses in store for you, if you decide to take up this advance order.

  1. In the course of my research I came across a magnificent Stross coat of arms.
    This coat of arms has been printed onto parchment paper (20x28cm) in the authentic century-old colouring -- a design comparable to expensive hand-painted heraldry. This beautiful coat of arms is yours TOTALLY FREE OF CHARGE when you place an advance order.

Parchment paper would of course be authentic sheepskin made from acid-free wood-pulp, and the authentic century-old colouring would be applied using an authentic centuries-old inkjet printer. But I must say I'm disappointed in Mr Pince's research; for he failed to take note of my address, and I'd be very interested in seeing what his diligent research could dig up by way of a Stross family tartan. Not to mention a Stross family title of nobility, a Stross family tree, and a Stross family motto. (As I am led to understand that my great-grandfather met my great-grandmother on the return leg of a business trip from Brussels to Tehran, on foot through the Balkans in the late 1870's -- yes, my family reproduce at sufficiently long intervals that my grandfather fought in the First World War and my father served in the Second -- I suspect he'd have to do rather a lot of digging. Either that, or make things up out of whole cloth on the assumption that anyone ignorant enough to use such a service is probably not going to realize they're being bilked.)

Anyway, as they say, you get what you pay for. Especially if what you pay for is a copy of the phone book, a mailmerge program, and a scheme evidently aimed at extracting cash from the rootless and vulnerable.

[Discuss scams]



posted at: 11:14 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 01 Oct 2004

Thank you all

I'm about to head off for the weekend (friends getting married down south), but in the meantime I thought I should just mention that the Locus SF bestsellers for October '04 list has two entries of great interest to me: Iron Sunrise enters the hardcover list in a tie for 8th place, while Singularity Sky is at number one in the paperback charts!

I'm sure this is just a mistake. Or something.

(On second thoughts, maybe not. The figures relate to sales in July. As that's the month when Iron Sunrise came out in hardcover and Singularity Sky went paperback, this might just be a blip caused by the new releases. In other words, I'll hold off on uncorking the bubbly until I see if they're both still in the list next month. I certainly wouldn't put too much weight on these charts: it's very much a metric for what the speciality stores are doing, rather than representing genuine best-sellerdom. Still, it's nice to know that someone appreciates you.)

[Discuss writing]



posted at: 18:39 | path: /writing | permanent link to this entry

Chicken Tracks

This photograph (warning: 600Kb) gives me the shivers, for some reason. It's probably the first ever snapshot of robots exploring a dead planet, as seen from orbit. Unlike those Apollo boot-prints, these chicken tracks will be filled in by the next dust storm to happen along. It's very much a thing of the moment ...

[Discuss space]



posted at: 14:08 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

specials:

Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone
Unwirer -- an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction
Inside the MIT Media Lab -- what it's like to spend a a day wandering around the Media Lab
"Nothing like this will be built again" -- inside a nuclear reactor complex


Quick links:

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Buy my books: (FAQ)

Missile Gap
Via Subterranean Press (US HC -- due Jan, 2007)

The Jennifer Morgue
Via Golden Gryphon (US HC -- due Nov, 2006)

Glasshouse
Via Amazon.com (US HC -- due June 30, 2006)

The Clan Corporate
Via Amazon.com (US HC -- out now)

Accelerando
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Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC)
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Free download

The Hidden Family
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The Family Trade
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Iron Sunrise
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The Atrocity Archives
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Toast
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Some webby stuff I'm reading:


Engadget ]
Gizmodo ]
The Memory Hole ]
Boing!Boing! ]
Futurismic ]
Walter Jon Williams ]
Making Light (TNH) ]
Crooked Timber ]
Junius (Chris Bertram) ]
Baghdad Burning (Riverbend) ]
Bruce Sterling ]
Ian McDonald ]
Amygdala (Gary Farber) ]
Cyborg Democracy ]
Body and Soul (Jeanne d'Arc)  ]
Atrios ]
The Sideshow (Avedon Carol) ]
This Modern World (Tom Tomorrow) ]
Jesus's General ]
Mick Farren ]
Early days of a Better Nation (Ken MacLeod) ]
Respectful of Otters (Rivka) ]
Tangent Online ]
Grouse Today ]
Hacktivismo ]
Terra Nova ]
Whatever (John Scalzi) ]
GNXP ]
Justine Larbalestier ]
Yankee Fog ]
The Law west of Ealing Broadway ]
Cough the Lot ]
The Yorkshire Ranter ]
Newshog ]
Kung Fu Monkey ]
S1ngularity ]
Pagan Prattle ]
Gwyneth Jones ]
Calpundit ]
Lenin's Tomb ]
Progressive Gold ]
Kathryn Cramer ]
Halfway down the Danube ]
Fistful of Euros ]
Orcinus ]
Shrillblog ]
Steve Gilliard ]
Frankenstein Journal (Chris Lawson) ]
The Panda's Thumb ]
Martin Wisse ]
Kuro5hin ]
Advogato ]
Talking Points Memo ]
The Register ]
Cryptome ]
Juan Cole: Informed comment ]
Global Guerillas (John Robb) ]
Shadow of the Hegemon (Demosthenes) ]
Simon Bisson's Journal ]
Max Sawicky's weblog ]
Guy Kewney's mobile campaign ]
Hitherby Dragons ]
Counterspin Central ]
MetaFilter ]
NTKnow ]
Encyclopaedia Astronautica ]
Fafblog ]
BBC News (Scotland) ]
Pravda ]
Meerkat open wire service ]
Warren Ellis ]
Brad DeLong ]
Hullabaloo (Digby) ]
Jeff Vail ]
The Whiskey Bar (Billmon) ]
Groupthink Central (Yuval Rubinstein) ]
Unmedia (Aziz Poonawalla) ]
Rebecca's Pocket (Rebecca Blood) ]


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April 2002
March 2002
(I screwed the pooch in respect of the blosxom entry datestamps on March 28th, 2002, so everything before then shows up as being from the same time)



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